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Excellent motherboard for general usage

I needed a cheap motherboard to put some basic parts together to build up a data recovery PC, little did I know that 2 years later I would be using it as my main computer, and this motherboard has done a fantastic job.

Originally the thought was I need atleast one type of each connector as I may have to recover from SATA or PATA, floppy, CD, DVD, etc. I didn;t need much video processing so internal would do as would basic sound. So I got this. Slapped in a basic PATA Hard drive and went away. 2 years later my existing main PC went down so I transfered lots of parts out of there into this, adn to be fair this is one very good computer. As usual Gigabyte have done a fantastic job with their motherboards regardless of low end or top spec.

This motherboard iss till very valid today and worth it if you want a cheap board.To give you an example of what it can handle this is my current spec in it.

I have an LGA775 Pentium 4 3ghz D processor, so its a dual processor but not a dual core.I have 2x 1GB PC2700 DDR sticks in, although I am contemplating adding in 2x512MB PC2700 sticks as I have some memory left over just to up this to 3GB of Ram (why not better than the RAM sitting on my desk.)I have a XFX GF FX5200 256MB graphics card which I added as it cost hardly anything just to boost the graphics after it became more of a working PC.It has 2x 200GB Maxtor ATA Hard drives a Western Digital SATA 160GB hard drive and a Pioneer DVR-109 DVD DL writer.The sound is still the onboard sound, but to be fair, unless your after a top of the range super sound studio you don;t need any more than onboard sound today.

Overall this computer is very basic, but with the above devices attached it shows that this motherboard can certainly handle most things chucked at it.

So if you are contemplating this motherboard, go for it, its very reliable and well worth the money, as it should eb even cheaper now. I know 4 years ago I would not have paid more than £50 for a motherboard for data recover PC.

However I do appreciate this is not going to be, nor will it ever be a top end machine. Obviously as this is 4 year old technology it can never reach full bars.